Don't come knocking

Don’t come knocking on my door
I don’t wanna see your face no more
It ain’t a pleasure to see you go
But I’m much too cold to let you know
Say say let’s move on, woman
Keep outta sight
Outta mind, outta sight
- The Datsuns, 2004

Four decent-sized boxes were waiting on my doorstep when I made it home from the North Coast around mid-afternoon on Tuesday. I’d forgotten about the leftover crap Don Richardson had been forwarding from our old digs in Maroubra, and was slightly surprised that the weather or light-fingered visitors hadn’t taken a toll on them, but Schoolies was over, holidays hadn’t begun yet, and things were back to as close to normal as they get around Point Lookout. I hauled them inside. None of them was particularly heavy – no gold bullion or bricks of hundred dollar notes then. I was at a bit of a loose end – I’d originally planned to spend today ripping weeds out of the garden, sweeping the paths and tidying up the outside of the property in advance of Don’s valuation visit on Thursday, but that was shot by not getting home last night, and I couldn’t be bothered after driving all morning – so I decided to sort through it and see if there was anything that deserved a reprieve from the bin.

BOX 1, read Marty’s careful handwriting, circa Christ knows when. KITCHEN STUFF. And the master organiser of flat cleanups spoke the truth – old appliances, even older cutlery and crockery, and Tupperware that dated from around the invention of Bakelite, or so it seemed. Nothing much useful, it seemed, other than evoking the odd memory of share-house living, like the old electric kettle with the faulty cut-off that always threatened to melt down the local power grid, which we ended up using down in the Brew Room for simmering ‘bittering’ hops at set-up time before adding to the brew. Or the Sydney 2000 Olympic Toaster, named for its massively over-engineered ejection mechanism which was capable of flinging toasted crumpets further than the world record for discus. Still, while some of it was evocative, none of it was worth two fifths of bugger-all. It was op-shop or skip for that lot.

The second box, which surprisingly enough was BOX 2, was full of CD cases. Empty CD cases. Unless Don Richardson had particularly light fingers, I figured they’d been like this for a while. And, remembering back into the dim and distant past, I vaguely recalled the Duffer deciding to recatalogue all his CDs into plastic sleeves in big ring-bound binders, to try and limit the massive amount of crap which built up in his living quarters. Did it work? Did it bollocks. And taking the CDs in and out of the sleeves scratched the hell out of them. A multi-level fail that one. Anyway, I figured I could throw the box in the back of the ute and drop it off at Duffer’s next time I headed south, in case he wanted to reunite them with their contents, if only to hock them at Theft Converters for weed money.

BOX 3 – and another genius Duffer idea, an even older one, this time aided and abetted by fellow music student Marty. A local Lismore second-hand shop was dumping all their stocks of old vinyl – this was in the late ‘90s, before vinyl became uber-trendy again, and before there were that many DJs spinning the Wheels of Steel in the local vicinity – and Phil and Marty went in and bought the lot for fifty bucks, about a hundred albums in their original sleeves, a very eclectic collection ranging from original ‘70s AC/DC and Black Sabbath releases to retro cheese like Engelbert Humperdinck and Peter Allen. The only problem was, we didn’t actually have a turntable. Well, we had one on the sharehouse stereo, but it was fucked, and we never got around to fixing it, despite the Duffer convincing Marty it was only a minor electrical job and he’d be able to fix it in no time, just as soon as he got his computer back together and sorted out a few other bits and pieces. So that never happened, obviously. Even trucking the fucking thing all the way down to Sin City when we moved a year or so later wasn’t enough of a memory trigger to get it sorted. These days I had a turntable as part of the stereo on my home theatre system, but that was a few days’ away from being sold on eBay (getting very close to reserve), and most of the stuff from the pile I had on CD anyway. This was probably another dump-it-on-Duffer job – hardly worth bothering Marty with it - maybe I could sell them on the inter-google and split the difference with them. Bound to be something collectable there that some muppet overseas would shell out big styles for. There’s always someone on the internet with worse taste in music than you.

Box 4 wasn’t numbered BOX 4, and while it was full of crap that probably belonged in a flat of some sort, it wasn’t any flat of ours; it was far too nice. It was all shiny and modern and expensive looking. I wondered for a moment whether Don had freighted the wrong box and sent me half his kitchen, but then came across a tightly-rolled Monty Python and the Holy Grail film poster which I remembered Matt had bequeathed (while still alive) to Sam. And then started recognising a few bits and pieces – this was stuff from McCarthy’s flat in the Cross, which he’d leased through Don after he’d moved out of the scabby old beach house at Maroubra in order to impress chicks. Or chick, in particular – this was the grubby period post-Lena when he was squiring Chastity about the place, and being seen in the right places with the right faces was of greatest importance.

It felt very weird sifting through McCarthy’s stuff, given I knew he was dead, but I reminded myself I’d done this before with Matt, and he’d been gone a lot sooner when I’d been through that experience. And more to the point, I didn’t really have any connection to this stuff, I’d only been to Sam’s Kings Cross pad a couple of times (technically it was actually in Woolloomooloo, but he said it was the ‘Cross because that had more scenester cred) and would have been hard pressed to figure out whether he’d ever made me a coffee with this particular stovetop ‘rocket’ or another. I really had no idea what to do with this stuff, the discarded household chattels of a dead man in a lake. I didn’t really want it in my house – though it all looked pretty schmick, it had obvious baggage – and while I’d have sooner packed it all off to St Vinnies, was that my call to make? Maybe I’d just ship it down to his parents’ place in Evans with a covering note and see what came of it, maybe the neighbours could set it aside for them.

Digging deeper, more personal stuff began to become unearthed; old books (a couple of biographies, a couple of Ian Fleming Bond books, an autographed copy of He Died With A Felafel In His Hand, a couple of Carl Hiaasens – one I hadn’t read and decided to ‘borrow’ from the pile), an old flip-up photo album – from a quick glance through, looked like mid ’02 or thereabouts, happy days – and a handful of CD cases, this time with CDs in them – CD-RWs, by the look of them – and spidery Sharpie scrawl on the discs themselves. Demos, probably. Unreleased, unseen, unheard demos.

Hmmm. Are you thinking what I’m thinking, B1?

Look, before you start with me, I wasn’t planning to steal a dead man’s unpublished riffs and present them as my own. Not without the guy getting some sort of credit, anyway. We’d been screwed over in this industry enough ourselves without screwing each other over as well. I was just interested to see whether I could recognise any of the material as Gasket songs in prototype form. I’d listened through Marty’s demo of Beef Week Queen – he was right, it sounded a’ight I guess but was just a bit too ‘thin’, needed some beefing up if you’ll pardon the pun – and had bashed around a few ideas on my acoustic Maton (the Atomic Mandarin and amp were in quarantine, as I didn’t want to fuck them up ahead of their charity auction being completed) but often my better ideas came from overlaying new ideas onto different riffs altogether, then grafting the idea back onto the original subject matter. It helped to come up with ideas for unusual combinations or progressions of chords which might not have necessarily occurred in the first instance, but worked. Basically, I was hoping that by farting around on the Maton listening in to McCarthy’s demos, it’d trigger something which added value to Marty’s.

After a feed of dinner, I hooked the laptop up to the home theatre – better get the use out of it before it gets boxed and sent – and dug out the first of the CDs. They were ProTools files, but luckily I had an older ‘unregistered demo’ version of that software, which worked for 30 days before needing registration (or deleting it off the hard drive and reinstalling it for another 30 days). Obviously I’d not used it in many a 30 day lump, but it still worked OK, and recognised the files – given they were at least as old as the software I was using, all was well. Track 1 had no title other than the file name, which was ‘Track 01’, but was pretty recognisable as Bugger All To The Power Of Less, which ended up on Bollocks To That, part one of our ‘double concept album in two stand-alone installments’ or whatever the fuck we’d called it at the time. In fact I’d heard most of the tracks on that first CD – even ended up co-writing a few of them as the songwriting process developed, indicating at least that Sam and I were still talking to each other at that stage. The filedates seemed to match with that, the disc having being burned in late December 2002.

The next couple of discs dated from eight months after, and presumably covered stuff written across that period, which would have been about the time McCarthy was living in the apartment all this shiny household shite was from, mid to late 2003: Marty’s solo album has skyrocketed out of sight and we’re all bitter about it, and everyone is sitting in their own little corners writing their own little songs and not cooperating at all with each other. As a result, we wrote a lot of self-indulgent fluff, without the quality filter that playing things past each other in the embryonic stages of writing would have provided; instead we just argued with each other over the relative merit or lack thereof of the others’ finished products, and arm-wrestled fiercely for space on the finished album (which, in the end, was decided by a tired, disinterested Intercom session producer six months after we’d broken up. That's either bitter or beautiful irony depending on whether you still have a sense of humour.)

So some of the stuff on McCarthy’s demo CDs was quite decent; a lot of it was arse. Poorly resolved ideas, verses mismatched to riffs, ambitious operatic stadium rock (somebody bought a Muse CD apparently) which couldn’t help but end up a heroic failure – it would have taken more drugs than Brady Priddle could have provided for McCarthy to write overblown pap like Brady Priddle, because Brady Priddle presumably had first dibs on the massive pile of gear in his basement and didn’t want to share. And more to the point none of McCarthy’s stuff was in the style of what Marty and I had in mind for Beef Week Queen – the sort of supercharged grubby garage punk which had launched us in the first place.

But at least it was more listenable than the last CD. The last CD wasn’t listenable at all – largely because it didn’t have any audio tracks on it. Probably some sort of data files instead, each over a hundred megs so they were fairly hefty – probably some form of media, possibly video, but not a file type my laptop recognised, because downloading random video content off the net is not something I tend to do a lot of *cough*. After a frustrating hour or two fucking about on the net trying to find out what sort of files they were and what played them, I cracked the shits and just chucked the disc into my DVD player – the magic DVD player – and powered it up. If all else failed, and it had, the magic DVD player would suss it. It was an older, early-adopter-type DVD player, a big fuck-off clunky thing that seemed to have its own gravitational pull. Yet despite this it was somehow massively forwards, backwards, sideways and upside-down compatible – as well as DVDs in all their various layering combinations and region codes, it could also read CDs (including MP3s), CD-Rs, CD-RWs and even some obscure proprietary formats that various brands of digital video cameras capture data in. It was as though they’d had the foresight to engineer as much platform compatibility as they could before rolling it off the factory floor. It was going out the door at the end of the week to whoever won the eBay auction, and I’d miss it.

Almost as soon as I’d plonked myself into the couch and grabbed the DVD player remote, I had a sense that I’d regret this. I mean, video files? Weird sorts of video files, possibly of a proprietary format, much like the ones that digital video cameras might generate? An entire CD of them? All made at around the same time he was going out with a lesbian porn actress? Anyone else see where this might be going?

(Anyone else want me to shut up and get on with it?)

It looked like going pretty much where you’d expect it to, given the above. The girl looked familiar. Well, they both did. One was Chastity, after all; I was familiar with her work. (Though not as familiar as the Duffer was.) The other just looked like someone I’d seen before. No, I confirmed after a quick ransacking of available records on file, it’s not one of my exes, thank Christ; I think I would have really bounced off the fucking ceiling if it had. And it all started innocently enough, amateur hand-held camera, two pretty girls kissing in an exploratory manner on a couch. No rose petals, candles or Andrew Blake style conceptual flute music, so although this had a fairly good chance of turning into girl-on-girl loving – why else point a camera at it? – it clearly wasn’t being made with girl-oriented sensitivities. Aphrodisiacs on hand looked more like an empty bottle of champagne and the remnants of a couple of lines of coke on an upturned mirror – not included in the household chattels in the box, and in any case the surroundings looked more like an upscale hotel room than McCarthy’s flat in the Cross. The girl giggled something into Chastity’s ear as she bit against our friendly neighbourbood pr0n starlet's earlobe.

“Don’t worry about him,” replied Chastity in her SoCal drawl, even though she wasn’t from southern California. “He knows how to stay the fuck out of the way. Till he’s needed…”

Still, Joe the cameraman stayed close enough to follow them into the bedroom – low light, expensive furnishings, rich satin sheets, and the same cheap-arse clock radio every frigging hotel room in the world has, its luminescent digital numbers reading around half-twelve (presumably at night judging by the darkness beyond the curtains). ‘Joe’ had said nothing, presumably too focused on his craft as a filmmaker to offer any dialogue. Christ, he did turn out like Matt after all. My mind had started wandering and I hadn’t bothered to chase after it: when and where was this? After some industry function? Awards night afterparty? Album launch? I was scratching somehow to get at the identity of the girl whose cocktail frock was being hungrily peeled off by Chastity, because it was lodged somewhere in the back of my mind but was refusing to come free (unlike the cocktail frock), and that was fucking annoying. I knew she was vaguely familiar because she was vaguely famous, but for what? Musician? TV presenter? Actress? Model? Or just famous for being famous, Paris Hilton style? I was pretty sure she was local, and I kept getting visions of fruit in my mind – obscure stuff like guavas and tamarillos – there must have been some sort of clue there, unless I was just some sort of mentalist. Most of you would probably offer even money there I realise. Basically, it looked a bit like that girl from that show but it wasn’t, or at least I didn’t think it was. You know who I mean. Whoever it was, she was wearing a skin-tone G-string which barely covered any of her interesting secret places, and didn’t seem to like having her nipples bitten – not nearly as much as Chastity enjoyed biting them, anyway.

I shuffled uncomfortably in my seat. They really are going to do this aren’t they? No fucking kidding?

The girl looked a little tentative – just a little, she was mainly getting into it, though being monumentally wasted (as I was beginning to realise she was) probably contributed – and glanced reproachfully at the camera, intermittently. Chastity placed her hand on her throat – gently, not as threateningly as that sounds – and reminded her that boys were meant to wait their turn, and he’d get his turn soon enough. Then Chastity traced her glossy fingernails the length of the girl’s body, right down to where her flimsy underwear was moments away from being prised off her lovely tanned thighs. I mean, I presume they were lovely and tanned, it was a bit dark to see and I wasn’t paying attention to her thighs per se, as much as what was going on between them…

Jesus, Angus, get a grip on yourself. And not like that either.

Now, I liked amateur lesbian porn as much as the next guy, particularly if the next guy was Larry Flynt (or Sam McCarthy), and particularly with a frisson of celebrity scandal to it – though obviously not that much of a frisson seeing as though I didn’t recognise the ‘celebrity’ involved. But surely, watching a dead man’s collection of home video nasties had to count as one of the lower ebbs in my life. Scratch that, the lowest. This was the bottom of the barrel. This was crass, inappropriate, and wrong. It paid me no compliments as a man, and as a human being. At any moment, the dead man would appear on screen, and the wrongness would just compound itself, as there would be nothing wronger on this Earth than seeing McCarthy on the job, alive or dead.

As such, I resolved to stop watching immediately.

...Or as soon as McCarthy turned up on screen. The very first sighting of his grinning Chevy Chase would equal bail-out time. For sure.

...Or, at the very least, if he turned up with dodger akimbo. That was the fucking LIMIT. Offski. No exceptions.

But, dammit, the lad had figured something about filmmaking that Lena hadn’t realised about journalism: it works a lot better when the storyteller stays the fuck out of the subject matter. He was letting his stars be stars and boy, were they starring. Chastity clearly wasn’t in her chosen career for the money; she was in it for a shitload of money (thanks v. much Spaceballs), but she also really, really enjoyed having nasty, hair-pulling girl-sex with seriously tasty starlets who weren’t that girl from that show, but might have been that chick from that other show who released that single that time. Chastity seemed to get off on the thrill and filth of her own performance – the biting, the scratching, the swearing, the constant barrage of degrading dirty-talk directed at the ‘nasty little whore’ underneath her – as much as the actual getting-off itself. And McCarthy seemed to enjoy letting her, though he was smart enough to shut the fuck up about it and lean on something stable for better focus. As for the girl (possibly from that show, possibly not), it wasn’t the best of times, it wasn’t the worst of times. She was singing along with the karaoke lyrics (Yeah baby, oh baby, yeah baby, rinse and repeat) but the occasions that McCarthy panned up from his detailed focus on the, erm, hydraulic interactions to catch her eye, I wasn’t totally convinced she was buying into the role. I’m afraid I failed to suspend disbelief. Overall, three and a half stars for me, Margaret. And by fuck you remind me of my punishing high school English teacher, anyone ever told you that?

Whether totally into it or not, she was about to come, and not even Chastity, barking at her like a prison camp lieutenant about how she was a worthless fucking slut who Sam’s great big cock was going to fill to bursting (lovely image, and based on various drunken overshares from Lena over the years, probably fiction) could put her off. She was probably off in a Happy Place somewhere, possibly the same room with the bottle of champagne and the lines of coke, and possibly even the rock star she’d come into here to fuck, but without the nasty little spitfire on his arm (though maybe with her magic fingers and very pointy little tongue, if that could somehow be arranged.) She was climbing the walls with wallpaper-searing volume, arching her back with an operatic tenor which made me reconsider whether she might be a pop singer after all – then again it was all Autotune these days, so who the fuck knew? – and, let’s be honest (and obvious), getting my absolute and total attention in doing so. Joe the cameraman missed no detail, no matter how anatomically superfluous, of her climax. Looked like a real one, though I’m not really an expert. Not usually down that end at the time, to be fair.

Chastity sucked her own fingers at length, then guided them to the girl’s lips and pushed one past them into her mouth.

“It’s OK, you nasty little bitch,” she consoled her. “That wasn’t the one that was up your ass.”

Charming, and undoubtedly a credit to the Mormon community of Salt Lake City. I can’t say I’d been looking hard enough to see whether she was right, but that probably spoke to my short attention span rather than any detail deficiencies in the cinematography.

Chastity straddled the pop tart’s torso, reverse-cowgirl style, and lowered herself onto her face. She looked up at the camera. “Put that fucking thing down, boy. You’re on.”

Which was my cue to GTFO. I scooped up the DVD remote and stabbed at the buttons before any sight of McCarthy’s pasty schlong could spoil that entry in the spank bank once and for all.

“Awww,” cooed a voice sarcastically. “I was enjoying that.”

I froze. One of those oh-is-that-the-Earth-swallowing-me-up moments. Time appeared to stand still, which either meant I had died, or I just really, really wanted to. I unfroze long enough and turned sharply enough to twinge my neck. So that was pain to go with the humiliation: bonus. Cue TISM: Someone walks too suddenly in, and you’re left standing with a silly grin, and your dodger’s still in your hand…

There, in the darkened hallway which led from the door to the loungeroom, stood my former fiancee. She was wearing her running gear, and was lathered lightly in sweat, but probably not for the reason I was. She folded her arms, and added, “Do you often watch porn with the door unlocked, Andrew?”

We were talking about the lowest ebbs in my life, I think. This had just rocketed into the top three. Unemployed, suspended, awaiting court-martial, homeless, destitute, nationally humiliated – to which you could now add caught watching amateur lesbian porn by my ex-fiancee. Red-handed. Or red-right-handed, as it were (thanks v. much Nick Cave.) This… this was the final humiliation. I could now die safe in the knowledge that I could sink no lower. Surely.

Then again… with my luck, Today Tonight were probably about to kick the door in after her. Maybe that Anna Coren would be keen for some. Matty White, not so much, but Anna – she seemed pretty nasty, I could see her busting out the Chastity styles after a lengthy night on the bubbly and blow. (Although my lawyers inform me I very much cannot see that and should immediately rescind from any such mental images. We’d had enough trouble from Channel Seven’s legal staff over Ernie Dingo Stole My Baby etc.)

“Only when I’m expecting company,” I eventually came back with. It wasn’t a very good comeback, but it was all I could scramble together at short notice. I had nothing. No explanation, no justification, not even a distraction. And all those pre-rehearsed diatribes, those set-piece arguments I’d planned and honed for when we finally met up again… just vanished into wisps, shimmering into the thick humid air between us.

She looked at me with that imperious little scowl that I remembered from when I’d first met her. So superior, so self-satisfied, so fucking contemptuous. And, let’s not deny the point, so fucking hot I would have done almost anything to vault the couch, press her against the wall and have her right there and then, up against the hallway mirror, licking the sweat off those hard nipples which stood defiantly through her clingy running lycra… Then again, a lot of women would have looked fucking hot in my current condition, and it was pretty fucking typical of the maelstrom of conflicting emotions boiling through me to resolve into lust; that an anger were about the only two emotions I had that I properly understood. I reminded myself who she was and what she’d done to me over the past months (i.e. trashing my house, getting me fired, sending her dodgy cop brother after me, etc) and most importantly how vehemently disinterested she would be in such a scenario. Get your act together, idiot, and for God’s sake pull yourself together. (Fuck it, not again. Forget I said anything.)

It took a while for me to realise that I was so shit, in fact, I’d not even managed to press ‘Stop’ properly. I’d missed, and hit ‘Skip to next’ instead, which the DVD player interpreted as find the next file in filenumber sequence and play that. I realised, because Bethany’s gaze went past me, straight through me, to the images on the screen.

“Oh. My. God.” Suddenly, starkly, wide-eyed astonishment. “That’s…”

Actually, she didn’t trail off like that. What she said was, “Oh. My. God. That’s Anastasia Papadoupoulos from Home and Away.” Except she didn’t actually say it was Anastasia Papadoupoulos from Home and Away, because she doesn’t exist, and if she did, she’d sue the fuck out of me, the publishers of this book and anyone within forty yards radius of a copy of it, for suggesting she liked rough coke-fuelled lesbian sex at Logies afterparties. And fair enough too. (The suing bit, not the liking rough coke-fuelled lesbian sex bit, though if you’re into that, good luck to you. And the rather luscious dark-haired girl on screen apparently did, considerably more than the last starlet had anyway.) To give her credit, Bethany at the time gave Chastity’s latest co-star her correct name with her accurate place of employment. But we can’t, because our lawyers think it would be a very bad idea indeed (I mentioned we were still on first-name terms with Seven’s legals didn’t I?) And it wasn’t Ada Nicodemou either, so don’t think you’re clever ‘cos you guessed it was an ethnic name and stuff.

“I’m beginning to see a pattern,” I remarked to noone in particular. Yeah, let’s pretend this is an academic exercise, that’ll get you off the hook. Idiot. I kept the rest of my theory to myself: McCarthy fills girls with booze and drugs, McCarthy brings girls home, Chastity fucks hell out of them, McCarthy watches, and makes home movies…

Bethany wasn’t listening. Mainly because I wasn’t actually talking. Before I realised, she was beside me on the couch, somewhere between horrified and captivated, but becoming more the latter than the former as the seconds ticked. After a while I was wondering whether she was going to ask whether we had any popcorn. Hell, it made an improvement from curling up on this same couch back in the day watching Grey’s Anatomy - she did the watching, I did the curling up, hoping death would come swiftly, much as I was doing now anyway. Even the smell of her was intoxicating, an evil, man-melting concoction of sweat and Stella (McCartney, not Artois. Though by fuck I could use a beer right now.) More to the point, was this some unholy, hideous honeytrap setup which would shortly see a certain representative of the local rozzers leaping out of the linen cupboard with the Tactical Support Group in train, ready to distribute my entrails across the furnishings?

“I can’t believe it’s her,” she murmured. “How did you get this stuff?” Then her eyes caught mine.“Wait a minute. I know how you got this stuff, rock star.”

'Rock star' had never sounded so patronising, and yet so heavy with context. Her body moved against mine – not in a ‘let’s snuggle on the couch and watch painfully badly written hospital soapies’ way, more the way a cat arches towards its royal subjects when it requires something of them. Christ knew what that was. I’d lived in a permanent state of confusion for so long I just wanted someone to sit me down and gently explain what the fuck the world required of me.

“You do realise how massively arrogant it is to sit around watching your own greatest hits compilations?”

Ahhh. Yeah, I might be slower than a wet weekend in Wollongong but I get there in the end. Hmmm. Might be a good time for McCarthy to keep his fucking Chevy Chase off screen, for the duration if possible. And I probably shouldn’t ask her who the girl in the previous scene had been. Those cool, feline eyes were now close, and regarded me with something a little more promising than the usual contempt. She bit her bottom lip, and even I could figure out what was starting to run through her mind, bizarre and unlikely as it seemed. “Who’s the other girl?”

“Just a girl I used to know. Bit of an expert. Used to do this sort of thing for a living.”

Bethany raised an eyebrow. “Looks like she enjoys her work.”

“Yeah, always tried to encourage her. Happy work life means happy home life…”

“I wouldn’t know,” she replied. “Maybe I need a career change. Still have her number?”

I shuffled uncomfortably in my seat. We really are going to do this aren’t we? No fucking kidding?

The image of Bethany, in place of the dark-haired girl on screen, tied to the bedposts with Chastity’s stockings and whimpering theatrically as Chastity pleasured her with fingers, tongue and whatever else came to hand – for further details consult your copy of 101 Uses For Garden Vegetables, Or 102 If You Eat Them – had only been given seconds to sear itself across my mind before a suddenly rather heated little girl was slithering into my lap and taking hold of my wrists to press my hands against her thighs. I went to kiss her, but found her fingers intervening between her lips and mine.

“You don’t get kisses, Andrew. Don’t deserve them. It’s not about that.”

“So what is it about?” I asked, my hand sliding under her backside underneath her loose running shorts, my fingers sensing the heat between her thighs, teasing at the thin, sweat-moistened cotton between my fingertips and the source of that heat. They knew what they were doing, even if I didn’t.

“Don’t ask stupid questions... in fact just don’t talk at all, you’ll just fuck it up...”

Damn. Amateur lesbian porn – minor-celebrity amateur lesbian porn at that – and nice Christian girls swearing, all in one night. Talk about ticking all the boxes marked ‘Dodgy fetishes best kept to yourself’. I didn’t know what to think, so I chose not to. Luckily this was the sort of stuff I could do without thinking, maybe the only thing I actually knew how to do well. She pushed me back across the couch and we began wrestling her top off, as the fingertips of my other hand began to rub her through her flimsy panties. An anguished-sounding cry from the screen – probably just overacting, Anastasia was a soapie starlet after all – made me crane my head towards the TV again, but Bethany pushed her hand across my forehead, grabbed a handful of hair and made me meet her gaze. In times past, I’d seen contempt in those piercing blue eyes; I’d also seen affection, frustration, amusement, annoyance, and maybe even love, or something that looked a bit like it. But I’d never seen this. This fierce, almost primal look of desire. Still feline, but now this was more predatory big-cat territory.

“You can watch this old stuff anytime, rock star,” she pouted. “But this is something you’ll never get to see again…”

She had a point. Argued it rather well, too.